On May 22nd, I told you about the 117 million email addresses and passwords of LinkedIn users captured in a 2012 data breach of LinkedIn  that were being offered for sale on the Dark Web, which is that part of the Internet where cybercriminals buy and sell stolen data.    I also told you that stolen passwords are useful to hackers because too many people use the same password for all of their accounts and therefore a person’s LinkedIn password may be the same as those used for other accounts so that due to a single data breach, your online security for every online account you use becomes in jeopardy. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook should have heeded this lesson because his Twitter and Pinterest accounts were hacked and taken over  for a short time because the hackers had found his password “dadada” in the LinkedIn data breach and used it to access his Twitter accounts and Pinterest accounts.

TIPS

Once again, this serves as a reminder to everyone that you should have unique passwords for all of your accounts.  A strong password contains capital letters, small letters and symbols.  A good way to pick a strong password is to take an easily remembered phrase as your base password.  For instance, you can use the phrase IDon’tLikePasswords as your base password.  Add a couple of !! at the end of the password and you have a strong password.  Since you should have a unique password for each of your accounts, you can adapt this base password for particular accounts by merely adding a couple of letters to distinguish each account at the end of the password so it may read, for instance for a Bank of America account, IDon’tLikePasswords!!BnkoAm.

In addition, Twitter provides for dual factor authentication as an option to be used as an additional security measure when accessing your Twitter account whereby a one-time code will be sent to your smartphone for you to use in order to access your Twitter account.  Zuckerberg failed, however, to take advantage of this option.